John Cuthber

"Has anyone here witnessed events on divining; failed or successful ?" No.

Imagine you look back on this from "some time later". The sensible assessment of the "success rate" in killing is Number of dead / number of killers, What's the probability distribution (for a given hit rate for killers). How can it differ from the hit rate?

Not to my knowledge. Feel free to cite counter-examples. However every schoolteacher knows of broadly the symptoms you describe...

People who are concerned about the thermal insulation of apparel are clos minded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing_insulation#Units_and_measurement

We don't; and it doesn't matter that we don't. We say "the door is open" or the door is closed". But we don't say "the door is close", unless we mean it is nearby (and we would pronounce it differently).

I think the idea is that some people get killed before they get a chance to kill.

A mixture of stress, psychosomatic reaction and confirmation bias sounds like a likely culprit to me.

I guess it's a matter of definition. There's a gold/ gallium alloy that's pale blue. It melts at 492 oC.

Odd question; at first I wondered how you would get more than half killed then I realised that if you lined up everyone in the world and put them in a really big circle then , if each one stabbed the person in front of them everyone would get killed. I doubt there's a well defined distribution. It would depend on the model of how people selected their victim. However, The "everyone get's killed" scenarios need a lot of planning while the "half the people get killed" scenarios can be arranged by more or less random- kill the first person you meet strategy. So I suspect the answer would be nearer half than all dead.

Strictly I meant a combination of all scientists sometimes are and some scientists often are... "Close minded" might be common- but it's still wrong. We are not talking about a mind that's nearby; we are talking about one that stopped being open.

Do you know what equation you need to look at?

"Are scientists arrogant, close-minded, and dismissive?" Well, those are pretty common human traits and scientists are human. So, I'd say the answer is probably yes. Another question would be what group of people can you not substitute for "scientists" in that question and not get the answer yes? I guess "Are scientists dead people arrogant, close-minded, and dismissive?"might get an answer in the negative. Perhaps an even better question yet would be "Are scientists- or non scientists- more arrogant, close-minded, and dismissive?"

Have you tried google? - there's nothing special about stars in this problem.

So, still no reason to think they read and acted on your suggestions rather than, for example, ones that they wouldn't have needed to translate.

"Now such job would be done by remote (radio and wire) controlled robots and drones. So better prepare them just in case, prior accident. They should be available immediately to use, in couple places around every nuclear power plant. " Probably, but I still can't help thinking that we are like generals working out how to win the previous battle. Shouldn't we be concentrating on how to stop the next disaster?

And his religion tells him he's doing the right thing.

When that's how things look, surely it's time to stop making them worse.

You have to wonder about the morals of those who support them in these actions too.

Yes; they were. Because none of them did anything to stop the cruelty of those barbaric beliefs. How could anyone be in a position to say "actually folks- let's stop persecuting people for no good reason" and yet fail to do so, be considered anything but evil? Perhaps the blood was only indirectly on their hands, but they were (and remain) responsible for many thousands of deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS OK, so when the Pope renounces his medieval ideas about this sort of thing, sells his gold throne + spends the money actually doing some good then you will have a Pope who isn't evil. Let me know when something changes.

A spot of googling tells me that bits of Mars reach 20C- that's clearly in the range for liquid water. Near 0 C the vapour pressure of water is about 4.6 mmHg so,as long as the pressure was more than that you could have liquid water without it boiling. Add a bit of salt to the water and you are on to a winner with the current martian conditions (just).

Cool- just what I needed; a really good random number generator.

If the dollar was red hot and dropped into a relatively small volume of water then yes, it would kill a lot of bugs. Otherwise, generally, no.

About a million years ago when I was a kid, there was in Scientific American magazine, an advert for a company who was demonstrating their ability to "think outside the box" by suggesting that power cables could be made from sodium. They had a point; it's not a bad conductor, and it's very cheap on a dollars per cubic metre basis. Obviously, three was a potential issue with rain- but, as they pointed out, many cables are coated with insulators. So they actually made cables from extruded polythene (which is cheap + boringly unreactive towards sodium) filled with sodium. I'm pretty sure you could do something similar with lithium. I can't be bothered to look up the melting temperatures at the moment. The metal and plastic won't have the same melting point so, if the metal is more refractory, extrude wires of it and dip them in molten plastic. if, on the otehr hand, the metal has the lower melting point, extrude plastic tubing and then pour molten metal into it. Halogenated materials are, in general, denser than hydrocarbons anyway.

" But I feel my suggestions less immediate than that." Do you have any idea how little ice "I feel" cuts on a science site? "Radio-controlling excavators and cranes isn't done usually, and I had not heard about it before. A crane driver would improbably have suggested that one." Somewhere between the official secrets act and client confidentiality, there's a reason why I can't explain why. But a large nuclear site in the UK was (at my suggestion) seriously considering getting a remote controlled concrete mixer truck and putting it in a barricaded enclosure for some other purpose some years before Fukushima went bang. However, I'm not daft enough to think that: was the first one to imagine that you can remote-operate a truck. This ". A crane driver would improbably have suggested that one." seems to be nothing more than intellectual snobbery. "Other people can (and often do) have the same ideas as I, but improbably at the same time." Do you really not understand that "at the same time- i.e. shortly after the incident- is exactly when you would expect lots of people to think of this?

It's another factor that wouldn't help.